“What was that all about?”
“Beats me,” Ellis shrugged, picking up one of the binkys for Liv and throwing it in the cart. “Can we get her the diapers with the unicorns on them now? She’s just about to need that size, so we may as well get them.”
And with that, he walked off toward the diapers, leaving me wondering what the hell was going on. The Townsends did a lot of random things – a lot of random things – but even that was too random for one of them. And with each aisle, each person, and each giggle or offer of a wipe, I felt that suspicion grow even more. It wasn’t until an old woman passed me a pack of adult diapers and told me that she found those were the best ones, but not to worry because it happened to the best of us, that I realized there was something on my ass. A quick check in the mirror next to the sunglasses, and I saw exactly what it was – a big brown stain right over my ass crack. And were those lumps? Yes, they were. A lumpy, big, brown stain over my ass crack.
“That’s why you had me sit on paper towels?” I hissed at Ellis, keeping my back to the glass display case that the expensive sunglasses were locked away in. “Not because you’d just treated the leather seats?”
Looking up with an innocent expression from the pink baby aviators, he scratched his forehead – right where the banana had landed this morning. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve got white shorts on, so if you’d sat on something you might have stained them, and that shit would show up on white.”
Keeping my ass to the glass the whole time, I started stepping to my right, relieved that the bathrooms were just behind us. “Go and get me something to change into. You did this, you fix it.”
Shrugging, he turned with Olivia in his arms to presumably go and get me some pants, just as three of the women from the retirement home walked up, cooing over Liv. “Oh, she’s adorable,” Mrs. Keating said, clapping her hands softly. “Just adorable.”
Back and forth they went, discussing how big she was getting, squealing when Liv smiled and proudly showed them her teeth, squeezing Ellis’s biceps and cooing over him, too… and then one of them, Mrs. Shaw, looked at the glass and frowned, her head slowly moving toward me. Throughout it all, her eyes didn’t leave that glass once, meaning that she stopped and stared at my crotch for a minute when she got to me. “Um, Josephine?” she called, slowly looking up toward my face. “Have you shat yourself, dear?”
Slowly, very slowly, I turned to look at the where she’d been staring at on the glass display case, and leading right to where I was standing was a brown smear that spanned the length of the whole thing. Figuring that the only thing I could do was to hide in the bathrooms until Ellis brought me a change of clothing, I smiled sweetly, and took slow steps backward, checking periodically to make sure I was going in the right direction. Just as I got to the entrance with the discrete – aka the huge ass sign with the words ‘customer toilets’ on it – my back hit against the wall, the very bright white wall. Maybe I could have run out to the car, or I could have picked up a towel to wrap around my waist, hindsight and all of that. However, at that moment, my brain was focused on hiding in the bathrooms until I had something to change into. If I’d gone with the options that occurred me later on, I probably wouldn’t have left a brown splodge on the white walls, or the nice big smear down the glass. I also wouldn’t have earned the nickname ‘shart lady, fart lady’s sister’ from the little kid that had said hi to Tabby at the diner that night with Evette. The moral of the story and the lessons learned by the whole debacle were: think outside the box, even if you don’t think you have a box, think outside of it. And, throwing baby food at Ellis was weak, I needed to up my game. I also learned something huge, though, something I was hugely grateful for. Ellis Beauregard had a seriously funny side that came out when I’d needed it the most. Whether or not he realized it, I’d needed that distraction – and the laughter that came much later – from what was going on in my life. It gave me a boost and cleared my head, and when Tabby came over later asking me why the little kid called Pete was calling me shart lady, it gave her the laughter she’d needed, too. And, honestly? It made me fall that bit more in love with him.